Brother Deecco, I’ve been waiting for a response from one of my gurus, who teaches Holocaust literature at a California university. She is a second generation on her father’s side, he being a Russian Jewish immigrant, and with relatives who survived the Holocaust.

I’d never heard your premise about national identity, I knew there were Germans who felt terrible about what happened (and I still think, rightly so), but I’d always believed that it was easy for HItler to do what he did because the Germans were so anti-semitic, and convinced of their superiority. I still think that makes sense.

But she says you are right. She says that it is true, that idea of superiority did not begin with Hitler, but she also believes that it could happen anywhere. She compares the resentment Germans felt for the Jews to the resentment we feel for illegal immigrants, I know in my community, I often feel we are being invaded by Mexicans and I try to remind myself that most of them are not drug pushers or rapists that they want a better life, as I did once. She says no one is immune, and she is not as judgemental of the Germans or the Poles or the Romanians as I am, although of course she feels the real pain of being a member of a race that has suffered over the millenia.

Hmmm….I will have to ponder. Probably for the rest of my life.

Thought you might appreciate that perspective. It still seems to me that each place has a feel, their own prejudices and idiocyncrasies. Well, of course, that is true. But I believe that certain characteristics lend themselves to terrible acts more than others. Very complicated.

I think I was the guardian angel of a Jewish person in Auschwitz, from the Ukraine, maybe Lvov, before I was born.

I was wondering if Blake had the right title. And now that you mention the word “masterpiece” I’m certain that he didn’t.

I think you meant Man’s Search for Meaning–Victor Frankl’s little masterpiece.

Dr. Falcouner is right, it’s so easy to forget that there are living breathing human beings in this cool box on my desk that does all the neat (and sometimes not so neat, Jackie has a will of her own, she insists on having her way)stuff, and dash off my oh-so-profound opinions. I love the sound of my own voice. I am my own favorite subject. What narcississm. Did I spell that right?

I am concerned that my sometimes humorous look at life will be misconstrued as trivializing very important and even sacred subjects. For instance, child abuse is a hideous thing. I don’t want to offend anyone who’s gay, either, one of my dearest friends is gay, and while I have trouble accepting her lifestyle, I love her very much (“not in the homosexual way, dat’s for sure” Rudy, Survivor). Please forgive me if I’ve hurt or offended anyone and forgive me in advance if I do it again. You know, why don’t we just post this every few days, in case I forget my serious moment.

I’ll try harder. Honest.

There is a book by a guy named Leslie Weatherhead, called The Will of God, I think, which gives a good explanation on the nature of the will of God.

If I were God, I would be striking people off the face of the earth left and right. I must say, knowing myself in this life, I can hardly believe I voted for the plan.

However, there was another question that has haunted me (and many, many others) since. How could God watch this and allow it? I have never found an answer that brings peace to the disquietude of my heart in response to that question. However, as strange as it may seem, I realized that it served me to forgive God for allowing it to occur when he could have stopped it. I know … the sheer arrogance at thinking that I could forgive God is breath-taking (and it took my breath away when I realized that it served me to forgive). I never saw God as needing my forgiveness, but only my need to forgive him. I experience forgiveness as a gift given to serve the one who forgives and not to fulfill a need of the one forgiven. Imagine my astonishment when I knew that God accepted my forgiveness. Yet I cannot forgive him as if I were one who had been wronged, one to whom God owed something, but only as one who blamed God for not stepping in when he could have stopped it. Should I ask God for his forgiveness for my holding him accountable for allowing the atrocities of Auschwitz, Pol Pot, Stalin, Serbo-Crotains, Mountain Meadows etc. etc. etc.?

The endless demand of the other upon me is also pregnant in this forgiveness. There is so much that I allow that I could stop … and always more than I can do for and with “the other” that the demand can never be silenced, never assuaged and never fully answered. Is that how God feels?

But Auschwitz stands as a symbol of the ultimate point where it all led too, and as the most visual reminder and warning for our times. For anti-Semitism is not dead yet, even in the United States. It is necessary that we are reminded of the evil consequences of anti-Semitism and therefore of racism as such, even today. The bottom line is to be able to recognize the potential evil in ourselves, the natural man as enemy of God, and our tendencies to distrust, despise, reject, and ultimately persecute those who appear different than we are.

Poles can, however, take the blame for the pogrom of Kielce, in which 42 Jews were killed, in 1946, long after the war was over. And for maintaining an environment in which the 380,000 Jews who survived (of 3.3 million before the war) dwindled to about 8,000 (due to so much emigration, thanks to continual anti-semitism).

I would not attribute this shameful record primarily to national identity, however. There are plenty of other instances of vicious pogroms (for instance, hundreds of thousands of Jews were slaughtered in Russia in 1881 and in the Ukraine in 1919). The Soviets massacred thousands of Polish reserve troops in 1940 at Katyn, many of whom were Jewish. It was a very complicated time with brutality everywhere.

For an interesting exchange on the issue of Jedwabne, where in 1941, it is alleged, Poles asked Germans if they could “settle accounts with the Jews” and then went on a killing spree, see here:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14800

Why don’t we ask the victims, those who experienced the Holocaust what they think? Do they have a right to an opinion and who decides? This is an individual decision, at its heart. To grant the people of Auschwitz compassion for guilt they feel is not to absolve what happened. To recognize that the Poles were between a rock and a hard place, and there are–and were– very good people in Poland cannot minimize the enormity of the deaths of Jews in Poland. How many came back? How many live there now? Is that not an opinion? An informed opinion, based upon personal experience? It’s easy to intellectualize this issue, but at its heart is the issue of the murders of millions of people. That tree did not fall in the forest without making a sound.